Tomato Heist Update

The next ripest tomato was stolen last night.  I picked and ate my final ripe one today.  It was a small one, about the size of a cherry tomato, which I guess is why they left it. At least I got one. There are two more green ones coming on, and I guess I shouldn’t get too attached to them.  WTF?

I Hope They Were Tasty

I don’t know how to feel just now.  My wife woke me this morning with the news that three of my biggest, ripest tomatoes (that I was planning to pick today) were pilfered in the night.  I had only five ripening tomatoes on my sad little plant to begin with, and now only two remain.  There are so many thoughts and feelings right now.  How did anyone know I had a plant with ripe tomatoes?  The plant is in a pot behind our house, which is not visible from the street, and only visible from the alley if you peer through the fence, and then it’s in a shadow at night.  Does that mean someone cased my tomato plant during the day?  Watching for when the fruit was ripe?  That’s really disturbing to think about.  Why did they steal my tomatoes?  Were they that hungry?  Did they need to feed their family?  It’s not like I have a big garden, or anything.  I have just the one scraggly tomato plant with five tomatoes on it, and they took three of them.  As my wife said, this makes me want to simultaneously leave food out on a nightly basis and also to do someone bodily harm.

Sure, it’s just three tomatoes, and we can certainly get by without them, especially if someone really needed them, but it’s the violated feeling that sticks with you.  Our house is very small, and the back window right by the tomato plant was open, which means someone crept up within inches of our open window, which is only about twenty feet from our open bedroom door, lingered long enough to pick the tomatoes, and then shuffled off.  And no, I don’t think it was animals.  I’ve never seen raccoons around here, and the stems have been so neatly plucked, it must have been done with dextrous hands.  This makes us wonder about our safety, generally.  I doubt if the tomato thief has any further grand nefarious designs on us, but the fact that someone was so close to us and took something away is really disturbing.

Here’s the main thing, though.  My wife just called me in tears when she got to work, mostly, she said, tears of gratitude for what we have.  She’d been imagining what could drive someone to snatch three little tomatoes from behind someone else’s house, and what sort of desperation must have been involved.  As the shock wears off from the initial discovery, this is the feeling I’m left with, too.  I start to wonder if there are people who make nightly rounds through the neighborhood, eyeing people’s gardens in order to feed themselves.  It makes me angry and sad to think about what must have happened to bring people to this. Not angry at them, but at a society that lets it come to that.  And sad that my three small tomatoes, mottled and sorry-looking, were needed so badly that someone had to sneak up and steal them in the night.  I do truly hope they were tasty.